Christians

"version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Rembrandt, in Nederlands): Een vroom gemoet / Acht eer voor goet - Rembrandt, Amsterdam 1634"

"This is portrayed after my wife when she was 21 years old, the third day after we were betrothed, on the 8th of June 1633"

"I have read your pleasant letter of 14th with singular pleasure. I discern your kind inclination and affection which I feel deeply obliged to requite [you] with service and friendship. Because of [my] inclination to do this, [and] in spite of your wish (of Constantijn Huygens], [I] am sending [you] along [with this letter] a painting, hoping that you will accept it, because it is the first momento which I offer you, Sir.. ..postscripttum]: My [dear] Sir: hang this picture in a bright light and in such a manner that it can be viewed from a distance. It will then sparkle at its best."

"version in original Dutch (origineel citaat van Rembrandt, in Nederlands): ..soo ist door [mijn] geneegentheijt [voor Huygens de raadspensionaris] tot sulx tegens mijns/ heeren begeeren dees bijgaenden douck toesenden [ bij de brief]/ hoopende dat u mijner in deesen niet versmaeden/ sult want het is die eersten gedachtenis/ die ick aen mijn heer laet./.. ..[postscriptum]: Mijn heer hangt dit stuck op een starck licht en dat men daer wuijt ken afstaen soo salt best voncken."

"When I read St. John's inscription of this scene And turn to see it in this splendid painting [of Rembrandt], then I ask myself if brush has ever followed pen As aptly, or dead paint near to life has been."

"There's a drawing by Rembrandt, I think it's the greatest drawing ever done. It's in the British Museum and it's of a family teaching a child to walk, so it's a universal thing, everybody has experienced this or seen it happen. Everybody. I used to print out Rembrandt drawings big and give them to people and say: 'If you find a better drawing send it to me. But if you find a better one it will be by Goya or Michelangelo perhaps.' But I don't think there is one actually. It's a magnificent drawing, magnificent."

"His own house figures in many aspects of his work. This was his home, but it was also his workshop and his showroom. The most evocative room is his sunlit studio, where so many of his paintings evolved. In a way, it's still a workshop. Visitors are taught to make their own artworks here."

"Well, any draftsman knows about speed. I mean, Rembrandt drawings, you can see speed in them. I am interested in speed. I think most painters paint faster than they tell you."

"In a way, Vermeer and Rembrandt are opposites. But Rembrandt is the greater artist, I think, because he's got more ingredients than Vermeer. Rembrandt put more in the face than anyone else ever has, before or since, because he saw more. And that was not a matter of using a camera. That was to do with his heart. The Chinese say you need three things for paintings: the hand, the eye and the heart. I think that remark is very, very good. Two won't do. A good eye and heart is not enough, neither is a good hand and eye. It applies to every drawing and painting Rembrandt ever made. His work is a great example of the hand, the eye – and the heart. There is incredible empathy in it."

"There's a Rembrandt trapped in this body. It's your job to find it."

"The Chinese regarded not acknowledging the brush and the marks it makes as a bit crude; to them, that was trying to cover something up, so not such a high form of art. European art historians don't look at China very much. But I suspect Rembrandt must have known Chinese drawings, and had probably seen a few. Amsterdam was a port, and the Dutch were trading a great deal in the Far East. For example, a Chinese master looking at Rembrandt's drawing of a family, now in the British Museum, would recognise it as a masterwork. (...) The trace of Rembrandt's hand is still alive. Your eye can go back and forth between brown ink: sister; fast mark: mother. How rewarding this is, to move from the physical surface of the paper to its disappearance when you read the “subject”, and then back again. How many marvelous layers does this drawing have? The mother has a double profile, Picassoesque. Was it an accident with the pen that he then used as a master would? Both profiles are fascinating about her character. Her skirt is a bit ragged, without any real detail; one seems to know this, and then marvels at how these few lines suggest it. Then, there's a passing milkmaid, perhaps glancing at a very common scene, and we know the milk pail is full. You can sense the weight. Rembrandt perfectly and economically indicates this with – what? Six marks, the ones indicating her outstretched arm. Very few people could get near this. It is a perfect drawing."

"Rembrandt is revered as one of the greatest and most important figures in the trajectory of art, and for good reason. He was, by design or nature, a revolutionary. As such he is perhaps a uniquely qualified interlocutor with other cultures and civilizations. (...) For the first time in the history of art, the painting speaks for itself. To put it another way, as Malraux phrased it, Rembrandt was the first to touch the soul with his paintings. He went well beyond the subject matter, which is only a pretense of sorts, to reach a more profound truth. As one watches the trajectory of his career arc, he is always stretching further and further in his paintings, to find his own concept of 'beauty'. That is why he was influential for future generations. By throwing off the confines of classicism, he freed others to push their own boundaries in the pursuit of beauty through their own conceptions of truth.. ..André Malraux described Rembrandt as prophet. He drew from the past to unleash the future. It is an exciting thought. Of course, he came to be seen as a metaphor for virtuosity. André Gide made a wonderful compliment to Dostoyevsky by claiming that he was the greatest novelist because he created portraits in his writings like Rembrandt painted."

"Two aphorisms about Rembrandt's paintings were drawn from his early biographies and repeatedly attributed to the artist by the French writers: 'A painting is finished when the artists says that it is finished' and 'A painting is not made to be sniffed', but contemplated from a distance.. .These paintings were identified with the latter years of Rembrandt's life, the period in which critics said he suffered most from financial pressures and a lack of public acclaim. Works identified with these final years were the most popular in France during the last decades of the nineteenth century."

"[Rembrandt] The most famous brand name in western art. In America alone it graces toothpaste, bracelet charms, restaurant and bars, counter-tops and of course the town of Rembrandt, Iowa just halfway around the world from the Rembrandt Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand. Funny thing is Rembrandt might have been quite pleased with such widespread notoriety. (...) Rembrandt was a realist craftsman who showed off his craft to sell his work. His paintings brim with self-confidence as this in bold oil sketch of the entombment of Christ painted with an almost modern bravado. His drawings were dashed off with a Zen-like assurance. His etchings complete and elaborate works of art in themselves which sold in great quantity to two Dutch middle class."

"One thing that really surprises me is the extent to which Rembrandt exists as a phenomenon in pop culture. You have this musical group call the Rembrandts, who wrote the theme song to Friends—'I'll Be There For You.' There are Rembrandt restaurants, Rembrandt hotels, art supplies and other things that are more obvious. But then there's Rembrandt toothpaste. Why on Earth would somebody name a toothpaste after this artist who's known for his really dark tonalities? It doesn't make a lot of sense. But I think it's because his name has become synonymous with quality. It's even a verb—there's a term in underworld slang, 'to be Rembrandted,' which means to be framed for a crime. And people in the cinema world use it to mean pictorial effects that are overdone. He's just everywhere, and people who don't know anything, who wouldn't recognize a Rembrandt painting if they tripped over it, you say the name Rembrandt and they already know that this is a great artist. He's become a synonym for greatness."

"Rembrandt was a model from the past that artists and critics [in France] sought out because he fulfilled their needs for a new 'non-ideal' exemplar, someone who could justify and bolster their own artistic projects and political views.. ..as a successful predecessor and he functioned as a mentor.. ..through the practical emulation of his artistic techniques.. .French artists did their utmost to absorb, invoke, subsume and usurp Rembrandt’s artistic persona in an effort to define their own identities."

"The picture of Jan Six, painted in 1654 is, then, a virtual encyclopedia of painting, from the loosest handling to the dry brush, sparely loaded with yellow, dragged over the surface at the edge of Six's right cuff; from the finest detail to the most impressionist daring. Yet Rembrandt manages to bring all this diversity of technique into a totally resolved single image. So that Jan Six does indeed stand before us much as we would dearly wish to imagine ourselves, all the contradictions of our character—vanity and modesty, outward show and inward reflectiveness, energy and calm—miraculously fitted together."

"There's a lot of great talent there [in Hollywood], but it's no place I wanted to spend much time. I'd rather spend time with Rembrandt and Goya at home. They're better company than those schmucks who never read Lord Of The Rings."

"Alongside Leonardo and Michelangelo, Rembrandt is one of the three most famous artists ever, with whom the public is on a first-name basis; and the name Rembrandt has lent the cachet of greatness and the grace of familiarity to sell everything from kitchen countertops to whitening toothpaste to fancy hotels in Bangkok and Knightsbridge. No work of Rembrandt's has attained the iconic status of the David or the Mona Lisa; yet Rembrandt seems to rank with the greatest of the great."

"During this period [1830 – 1900, in France], Rembrandt was appropriated as a symbolic figure by critics and painter-printmakers and assigned a heroic, cult-like artistic and political status. French critics molded and reinvented earlier anecdotal biographies.. ..to formulate an artistic persona that had particular meaning [for] nineteenthcentury French vanguard art and politics."

"..the Rembrandt whom Constantijn Huygens had discovered was driven constantly to measure himself against the mark others had set: his Amsterdam teacher Pieter Lastman; his Leiden friend and rival Lievens;.. ..Most of all, though, and for an entire decade, Rembrandt measured himself compulsively against 'the prince of painters and the painter of princes': Peter Paul Rubens. To become singular, Rembrandt had first to become someone's double."

"Rembrandt was already deeply involved in his attachment to Rubens — at once adopting him as his model and fighting to have the differences noticed. His [painting] 'Descent from the Cross', also painted in 1631 for the Stadholder, was directly taken from the engraving after Rubens's greatest masterpiece in Antwerp Cathedral', while at the same time being a calculated Protestant response to the immense diapason of the [catholic] Flemish master's altar-piece."

"City chronicler Jan Orlers's 1641 account relates that 'he had no desire or inclination' to study at the university, and that 'his only natural inclination was for painting and drawing, so that his parents were compelled to take their son out of the School and following his own wishes to apprentice him with a Painter where he might learn the foundation and principles [of art]."

"Was the miller's son, all of twenty-three, stuck in pious, professional Leiden, already presuming to present himself as the incarnation of Genius? No wonder a visitor from Utrecht, Arnout van Buchell, who encountered Rembrandt in 1628, thought him 'highly esteemed but before his time.'"

"I gave up painting by 16. I secretly thought I would have been Rembrandt by then. I don't believe in genius. I believe in freedom. I think anyone can do it. Anyone can be like Rembrandt.. Picasso, Michelangelo, possibly, might be verging on genius, but I don't think a painter like Rembrandt is a genius. It's about freedom and guts. It's about looking. It can be learned. That's the great thing about art. Anybody can do it if you just believe. With practice, you can make great paintings."

"Offhand, I think of the Schubert Fantaisie in F Minor. The weight of the melody here is such that you can't place where it is, or what it's coming from. There are not many experiences of this kind in music, but a perfect example of what I mean can be found in Rembrandt's self-portrait in the Frick. Not only is it impossible for us to comprehend how this painting was made; we cannot even fix where it exists in relation to our vision. Music is not painting, but it can learn from this more perceptive temperament that waits and observes the inherent mystery of its materials, as opposed to the composer's vested interest in his craft. Since music has never had a Rembrandt, we have remained nothing more than musicians."

"About 1630, Constantijn Huygens in his briljant analysis of the figure of Judas in Rembrandt's 'Judas Repentant' argues that: 'Rembrandt had surpassed the painters from Antiquity, as well as the great sixteenth-century Italian artists when it came to the representation of emotions expressed by figures that act in a history painting'."

"But the first documented encounter [ of Rembrandt and Jan Six] was in 1647, 'when Rembrandt made a portrait etching of Jan Six', a work exactly calculated to gratify his self-image as a gentleman-virtuoso. What did the two men of unequal age, background, and ambition see in each other in 1647? Rembrandt had many pupils, assistants, and patrons, but few friends, least of all of the elegantly cultivated kind, personified by Jan Six."

"The psychological truth of Rembrandt's paintings goes beyond that of any other artist who has ever lived. Of course they are masterpieces of sheer picture-making. In the 'Bathsheba' he makes use of studies from nature and from antique reliefs to achieve a perfectly balanced design. We may think we admire it as pure painting, but in the end we come back to the head. Bathsheba's thoughts and feelings as she ponders David's letter are rendered with a subtlety and a human sympathy which a great novelist could scarcely achieve in many pages."

"Did it ever occur to anyone how boring his pictures are?"

"Of all the Baroque masters, it was Rembrandt who evolved the most revolutionary technique and who seemed to grow into the Italians' spiritual heir. Where others needed five touches he was using one, and so the brushstrokes had begun to separate and could sometimes only be properly read from a distance. The exact imitation of form was being replaced by the suggestion of it: to some of his contemporaries, therefore, his paintings began to look unfinished. It was from the Venetians that he had learned to use a brown ground so that his paintings emerged from dark to light, physically as well as spiritually. Yet, despite a palette that was limited even by seventeenth century standards, he was renowned as a colorist for he managed to maintain a precarious balance between painting tonally, with light and shade, and painting in color. Just as form was suggested rather than delineated, so the impression of rich color was deceptive. Never before had a painter taken such a purely sensuous interest and delight in the physical qualities of his medium, nor granted it a greater measure of independence from the image."

"Probably no one has combined to as great a degree as Rembrandt a disciplined exposition of what his eye saw and a love of line as a beautiful thing in itself. His 'Winter Landscape' displays the virtuosity of performance of an Oriental master, yet unlike the Oriental calligraphy, it is not based on an established convention of brush performance. It is as personal as handwriting."

"Rembrandt was himself a universal spirit, and this spirit informs everything that he painted, so that a biblical legend, a carcass of an ox, a naked woman, his own self-portrait — all stand as symbols of an all-embracing sympathy. Perhaps only Shakespeare, in another art, has that kind of universal intelligence."

"His temperament was that of a Prophet — a God-possessed man, brother to Dostoevski, and teeming with the future, a future he bore within him as the Hebrew prophets bore within them the coming of the Messiah, and as he bore within himself the past."

"It is tempting to believe that Rembrandt might have owned, or seen, Chinese or Japanese paintings. But there is no evidence for this at all. Yet when we look at some of his drawings, notably those sketched freely in ink or ink wash, we find a combination of formal clarity and calligraphic vitality in the movement of pen or brush that is closer to Chinese painting in technique and feeling than to anything in European art before the twentieth century. This, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, we must attribute to coincidence and to Rembrandt's unique gifts as a draughtsman."

"A painting by Rembrandt not only stops the time that made the subject flow into the future, but makes it flow back to the remotest ages. By means of this operation Rembrandt achieves solemnity. He thus discovers why, at every moment, every event is solemn: he knows it from his own solitude."

"Compare me with Rembrandt! What sacrilege! With Rembrandt, the colossus of Art! What are you thinking of, my friend! We should prostrate ourselves before Rembrandt and never compare anyone with him!"

"Neither Imperial Russia, nor the Russia of the Soviets needs me. They don't understand me. I am a stranger to them. I'm certain Rembrandt loves me."

"Rembrandt to me is the greatest artist in history — not just because of his work, but also the impact that he had on the trajectory of art, by allowing artists to express themselves with unprecedented freedom. The DNA of Rembrandt can be found in Goya, Van Gogh, Picasso, Delacroix, Turner and all the way through to Russian avant-garde and Chinese contemporary art. That's what I would call transcendent influence."

"Rembrandt painted about 700 pictures—of these, 3,000 are in existence."

"There he Rembrandt stood, when everything was on the canvas [of the 'Night Watch'], but then he shook his head.. .In his opinion the two men [in the center] did not yet come forward into the foreground. Then he [Rembrandt] took up his large palette again, dicked his thickest brushes deep into the paint, and once again took on these two front figures with powerful strokes; here more depth, there more light. In this way he put everything to the test, in order to give an even more powerful relief to what needed to stand out. Then he saw that it was good, and that is how he left it."

"Kolakowski, as we will see, has clearly depicted the religious life and the forms of community constructed by the cultured strata of the Dutch bourgeoisie. Spinoza lives in this world, with a vast network of simple and sociable friendships and correspondences. But for certain determinate strata of the bourgeoisie the sweetness of the cultured and sedate life is accompanied, without any contradiction, by an association with a capitalist Power ('potestas'), expressed in very mature terms. This is the condition of a Dutch bourgeois man. We could say the same thing for the other genius of that age, Rembrandt van Rijn. On his canvases the power of light is concentrated with intensity on the figures of a bourgeois world in terrific expansion. It is a prosaic but very powerful society, which makes poetry without knowing it because it has the force to do so."

"It's an exhilarating feeling, holding that painting, especially when you have studied it for so long and are now the sole proprietor of said piece. To an art lover, possessing a Rembrandt can be likened to winning the World Series, the Super Bowl, and the Stanley Cup all at once. You feel a real sense of almost being a part of the artist's mind."

"He can blend, like no one else, reality with mystery, the bestial with the divine, the most subtle and powerful 'craftsmanship' with the greatest, the loneliest depths of feeling that painting has ever expressed."

"What an infinitely sympathetic painting. This is the essence of Rembrandt's genius. It's his sympathy for humankind which makes his art eternal."

"There is something of Rembrandt in the Gospel, or something of the Gospel in Rembrandt, as you like it — it comes to the same, if one only understands the thing in the right way."

"Rembrandt is so deeply mysterious that he says things for which there are no words in any language. Rembrandt is truly called a magician... that's not an easy calling."

"Would you believe it – and I honestly mean what I say – I should be happy to give ten years of my life if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture [Rembrandt's 'Jewish Bride'] for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food?"

"The best history is but like the art of Rembrandt; it casts a vivid light on certain selected causes, on those which were best and greatest; it leaves all the rest in shadow and unseen."

"This print speaks [the 'Hundred Guilder Print', a famous etching of Rembrandt], the shadow is vaporous like an autumn day and the figures are animated with a breath of air.. ..it summarizes everything, sentiment, order, moral, light and painting. If I looked at it an entire day, I would be dazzled and almost frightened by Rembrandt's genius.. [Rousseau ended up the talk paying 8.000 francs for the print]"